Recipe Details
Recipe Keywords
- kids x
Ingredients (yields Serves 4 servings)
- 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
- 1 ounces Italian salami, finely diced, or pulsed in a food processor
- 4 cloves garlic, minced
- 1 28-ounce can San Marzano plum tomatoes, drained, juices reserved
- 5 or 6 fresh basil leaves, plus more for garnish
- Pinch of sugar
- Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper
- 1 1/2 pounds frozen spinach-and-cheese ravioli
- 1 ounces ricotta salata or parmesan cheese, grated
Cooking Instructions
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Public Comments (1)
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Robin_Horrigan
May 13th, 2010
This has a very high nutritional profile for a pasta recipe. The spinach ravioli I chose had a whopping seven grams of fiber all by itself - before you add the homemade tomato sauce. I watched my husband's reaction to the green pasta filled with green flecks very carefully (he's a total green veggie hater) and he went back for a second bowl. When I asked him point blank what he thought of the green ravioli, he said "If you want to try to get veggies in me by hiding them in something like this, I'm game." So that is a big vote of confidence.
I took a couple of shortcuts. I refuse to buy whole canned tomatoes and then crush them up myself. This recipe called for draining whole, canned San Marzano tomatoes (but reserving the liquid) and cooking the tomatoes first to dry them out a bit, and then adding the reserved liquid later. But then they also recommend adding water to the sauce. I found this odd and decided it was a lot of unnecessary extra steps to an otherwise quick, weeknight recipe that could be made with two pots and a cutting board. So I used canned crushed tomatoes, added the entire can at once along with the basil, sugar, salt and pepper, and did not add the water in the end. The sauce came out nice and thick - honestly, if I ran my spoon through the pot, it was like the red sea parted. So add water or not depending on how thick you think you'd like it. You can always add water and cook it down if you think it's not right.
San Marzano tomatoes are generally the best quality canned tomatoes you can buy and I have yet to find them in any other way than whole. So that could be the reason for buying them whole and crushing them yourself. But I have a very good backup - Whole Foods 365 organic crushed tomatoes with basil are excellent. I also use bottled minced garlic very often in my weeknight cooking, and it did just fine here.
To combat my shortcuts, I splurged and bought some really good ricotta salata (for those that do not know, this is basically ricotta cheese with the liquid drained from it to make a diceable, sliceable cheese) and a 2 oz. chunk of very high quality dry salami. Every time I got a bite of the salami my taste buds just sang!